54 PRINCE BULOW

acting in the reverse sense. Quoting from a student song of
his Bonn days : " Freibeit, die ich mine " lie ddincd social
democracy as the urge to freedom, repeating ir later when ho
was Chancellor in the Reichstag, M freedoin for (he apostles
of free-thought, and terrorism for the rest :

Und wills* du nlcht min B/'W<r
So scblag icb dir den Schudcl tin.
(If you won't be my brother,
Til bash in your skull)

On my return to Vienna from Rome I had on tuy own
initiative begun, in conversation with newspaper men, to
point to Herr voa Billow as one who had impressed me as a
hope of German statesmanship. I said openly that I regarded
him as the future leader of German foreign policy*

A year later the Emperor appointed him head of the
Foreign Office. I then devoted to him in the New FwV
Presse a leading article in which I said thai Billow as Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs at the side of the venerable
Chancellor Hohenlohe was tantamount to Foreign Minister
cum jure successions to the Chancellorship.
f The future Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs on his
way back from Rome stopped in the Austrian Alps* as he
had done twice before. When I wrote to him from Vienna
asking if I might call upon him, he wrote :

HOTEL PANHANS, SBMMBRING,

My wife and I .will be delighted to see you under the
pines of; the Austrian mountains, after our last meeting
in the citron and orange groves*
• . . But come as a human being and only as a human
being. ' Hier bin ich Menscb, hier darf ic/fs jWa."
He was quoting from Goethe's Faust. Shortly aftet my
visit I sent Frau von Biilow a monograph I had written on
Ferdinand Gregorovius, the writer on German history and
Italian art. She acknowledged my letter as follows :